There is a fit & happier person inside everyone

Monthly Archives: July 2016

You know who you are, I’ve seen you out there. Heat Advisory alert pops up on your weather app? Humbug! Meteorologists tell us the air quality is poor, the UV Index is off the charts, stay inside and avoid any unnecessary activity outdoors? Nonsense! Clearly, that doesn’t apply to you. You’re a road warrior. You run marathons, kick butt in triathlons and cycle for hours on your CrossFit “recovery” days. Being sidelined by heat domes is for amateurs. For you, the warnings are a double dog dare.

I don’t like messing with my workout schedule or pulling back on the intensity and detest missing a workout. But, consider me solidly behind the meteorologists and doctors who urge us to put safety first when it comes to working out in extreme heat and humidity. It’s a combination of my personal ultra-sensitivity to these conditions and probably knowing a little too much about the risks as part of my education as a trainer. Yet I know a lot of my fellow fitness enthusiasts don’t share my aversion to hot weather workouts.

Look, I’m not here to judge. I’m here to help. I understand these kinds of conditions do tend to come in waves. If it were a matter of a day here or there, we could manage a work around, no problem. But, when we have a week to ten days of this living hell, we’re not going to take that kind of time away from training. The question is: How to work out at the frequency, intensity and duration desired without a drop in performance or risk of serious health consequences in extreme conditions?

Rule #1: Accept the body’s limitations. No matter your fitness level and conditioning, you’re human. It’s a fact the human body will institute a series of body-cooling responses under extreme hot and humid conditions that will reduce performance compared to the same workout under normal conditions. It’s a necessary response to keep the body’s core temperature from rising. There’s no work-around, nothing you can do to over-ride the sympathetic nervous system.

Rule #2: Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Once you understand and accept Rule #1, you must also come to realize that pushing yourself through your regular routine under extreme conditions greatly increases the risks for dehydration and heat stroke. It’s a high risk, no reward situation.

Every Tuesday, you do your longest run at race pace and this coming Tuesday is predicted to have the highest heat index of the week. If you put your ego above your training goals, you may decide to change nothing. However, your performance output will be less compared to most other Tuesdays and you run the risk of adverse effects that could affect some or all of your training for the rest of the week.

Wouldn’t it be better to adjust your usual schedule to maximize output for the entire week? Perhaps Friday is normally your rest day and the heat wave is predicted to break on Thursday. Under those circumstances, I’d recommend swapping your rest and endurance run that week and re-arrange your remaining training days for the week accordingly.

If the prediction is for one of the dreaded heat domes that can last over a week, acclimatization is the best strategy. This requires a gradual build-up in distance and intensity over several days while following the guidelines listed below. This trains your body to adapt to the conditions.

Everyone adapts at her own pace, so you need to listen to your body to determine when you’ve fully adapted and can safely workout under hot and humid conditions. For some, full acclimatization can be achieved in a few days, for others, it can take a week or more. However, even when fully acclimated, safety guidelines are a must once the heat index climbs above 80°. It’s not advisable, even for the most fit, to exercise outdoors when the heat index is above 90°.

Guidelines for Exercise When Heat Index > 80° F

Hydration: 2 hours prior to exercise drink 17-20 oz of water. Sip water while exercising – approximately 7-10 oz every 10-20 minutes. Following exercise, drink 16-24 oz for every one-hour period of your workout. Some of the post-workout hydration should be in the form of a sports drink to replenish sodium, glucose and electrolytes. If your workout is longer than an hour, a sports drink or gel while exercising is also recommended.

Time of Day: Avoid the hottest time of day when sunlight is direct and shade is in short supply – 11am to 5 pm. Opt for right after sunrise or just before sunset when the sun is low on the horizon. Keep an eye on the sky and forecasts, high heat and humidity increases the likelihood of dangerous storms.

Intensity: Avoid any high-intensity or prolonged endurance exercise. These are the days to do moderate intensity, shortened workouts.

It’s important to note that exercising in high heat and humidity is safe only for conditioned, healthy individuals. It is not safe to exercise outdoors for individuals who have cardiovascular, pulmonary or circulatory conditions or for those who are de-conditioned when the heat index exceeds 80 degrees. For more information on hot weather exercise, click here.

I, for one, am looking forward to a forecasted temperature that begins with the number eight. Looks like I’ll have to wait a while. 🙁 In the meantime, be fit, be smart, be safe and stay cool.

Last week I revealed this summer’s Small Step – Reflect, Revamp and Renew. Each of the three pieces is equally important. But one must thoroughly delve into the reflection component in order to revamp goals and establish a renewed commitment to fitness in the most meaningful and relevant ways.

One of the best tools to use to investigate your unique obstacles to fitness and to discover clues to the types of fitness behaviors that best suit you is to keep a daily journal. You can read how this is true in “6 Ways Journaling Will Change Your Life” by CM Smith on Lifehack.

In addition, you may find that journaling for the purposes of fitness bleeds into helping you in other aspects of your life. Psychcentral.com has chronicled the scientifically proven health benefits, both physical and mental, of keeping a journal. You can read about them here.

Many of us know this intrinsically even without reading studies to verify the claim. But, not all of us can find the motivation or time to start this valuable habit. Knowing the journaling vehicle that best complements your lifestyle might help.

I think most people might imagine a literal journal and pen – I know I do. But, a lot of us, multitaskers in particular, don’t find that appealing or practical. Who wants to lug around a book and pen all day? And maybe you’re just too tired at the end of the day to expend the energy on it or maybe you feel you can’t accurately recall thoughts and feelings after so much time has elapsed.

However, we do have a variety of electronic devices literally at our fingertips most of the day. Perhaps if we could journal-on-the-go on whatever device is at hand when the thoughts and feelings arise, it would be much easier to start journaling and keep it up. For this reason, I found Lifehacker’s “Five Best Journaling Tools” by Jason Fitzpatrick helpful. There you will find the top journaling vehicles from a survey taken of journal enthusiasts. Not surprisingly, most prefer the old-fashioned pen and paper. But there are many who prefer the convenience and efficiency of e-journaling. There are several e-journal recommendations, read through their suggestions and decide what’s the best fit for you.

Lastly, don’t forget the unique focus of journaling for this month’s Small Step:

Identify negative triggers to fitness: What are the external forces or situations that make you more likely to choose less healthy foods, to overindulge or to skip a planned workout?

Identify positive triggers to fitness: What are the external forces or situations that make you more likely to choose healthier foods, to stay within portion parameters and to engage in a workout enthusiastically?

Take note of feelings, both physical and emotional, surrounding eating: How did you feel before you ate, what did you eat and how did you feel after you ate?

Take note of feelings, both physical and emotional, surrounding exercise: How did you feel when you were contemplating a workout? If you decided to workout, how did you feel during and after the workout? If you decided not to workout, what were the reasons you gave yourself for not exercising? How did you feel after making that decision?

It’s vital to record internal dialogue – positive and negative – pertaining to fitness: What did you tell yourself when you chose to eat a particular food (healthy or unhealthy), when you chose to workout, when you chose not to workout, when you stepped on the scale, when you looked in the mirror, when you put on an article of clothing, when you compared your body to others’ bodies?

Make note of what you did and how you felt after you had a positive self-dialogue and what you did and how you felt after you had a negative self-dialogue.

It takes at least a month of tracking these thoughts and feelings to identify patterns that then can be useful in setting up your fitness goals and the strategies you’ll use to achieve them.

For example, suppose someone has a penchant for celebrity gossip websites. If she’s not journaling regularly, she might not realize that, as she scrolls through photographs of thin celebrities, she has a lot of negative thoughts about her own body. She also may not realize she often craves comfort foods like ice cream and chocolate afterwards. But, if she journals long enough, she’s likely to recognize this pattern. She may decide the guilty pleasure she thought she was getting from TMZ isn’t worth it if it’s sabotaging her fitness goals.

So, find the journaling vehicle that works for you and take the time this summer to engage in self-exploration. You may be amazed by what you learn. We often say knowledge is power. How powerful, then, knowledge of self will be for you.

July’s Small Step is relevant no matter where you are in your fitness journey. This time of year can be the most difficult to stay on track with exercise and diet goals because routine is a friend and disruption is the enemy. Oppressive weather, vacations, kids at home and the endless array of outdoor gatherings brimming with food and drink knock us off familiar routines and can distract, tempt and derail the most avid exercisers and healthy eaters. For all these reasons, if something hasn’t been enjoyable, do-able or working quite right for you lately, it’s doomed to fail during the summer months. Better to adjust your expectations and goals before you give up so you can give yourself a fighting chance to succeed.

Now’s the time to reflect on what is and isn’t working, revamp your goals to get you through the summer, and renew your commitment to fitness and health so you’re off and running when September brings normalcy back into your life.

Reflect

If you aren’t already keeping a journal, this is a good time to start. In this case, I’m not talking about tracking or recording food intake and exercise. While this type of log is beneficial, especially for those with weight-loss and health-specific goals, a different type of tracking will be more helpful for this month’s assignment. (However, tracking food intake and exercise is part of September’s Small Step. So, if you’re already doing so, keep it going and you’ll be ahead of the game when summer is over.)

Your assignment is to record thoughts, reflections and feelings, both physical and emotional, surrounding food intake and exercise. How were you feeling before and after you ate a meal or snack? What was your internal dialogue when you chose to exercise or not to exercise on a given day? How did you feel after exercising or not exercising? Does exercising at a certain time of the day feel more productive or less productive for you? Does eating certain types of foods or performing certain exercises elicit positive or negative feelings? On the days you feel more fatigued or in a low mood, what did you eat and what types of movement did you perform?

Be sure to journal every day. It’s best to jot down these reflections soon after experiencing them. If that’s not possible, make a mental note of them when they occur so you can record them accurately later in the day.

Use your journal to identify positive and negative triggers to your fitness behavior so you can maximize the positive triggers and minimize the negative. The more detail you put in your journal, the more relevant and valuable the information is when setting goals, scheduling exercise and planning meals and snacks.

While this information is vital to setting relevant and achievable fitness goals, it also creates a historical record of your fitness journey. Imagine how inspiring it would be for you to flip back to one of your own personal success stories and relive it, particularly at a time when you might be experiencing a set back.

Revamp

Use the knowledge you’ve gained from your reflections to set some short-term exercise and diet goals to get you through the summer. To do this in a meaningful way, keep in mind the unique circumstances of the season.

Some goals are more difficult to achieve in the summer. For example, it can be tricky if the bulk of your cardio is done outdoors because heat and humidity are valid deterrents. We all need to plan for that and choose either lower intensity outdoor exercise, climate-controlled indoor workouts or water-based alternatives. Other goals are more easily achieved this time of year, such as eating more fresh, local fruits and vegetables.

To avoid other common summer pitfalls, come up with game plans for: including your children in your healthy habits, pre-determining what and how much you’ll consume at the pool party and researching what you can do for exercise and eating healthy while on vacation. Planning ahead isn’t difficult but it can be the difference between success and failure.

Once you have your specific summer plan in place, use the next two months of reflection to set a course of goals beginning in the fall. Maybe they’ll be similar to what they are now or maybe they’ll be entirely different. In either case, they need to be realistic, manageable and enjoyable. The more thorough you are in your reflections, the more likely your goals will meet these three criteria and, therefore, the more likely you’ll succeed in achieving them.

Renew

Just as vacation is a chance to break out of the mundane, recharge and renew, so should this time be for your fitness routine. Appreciate how enjoyable it is to move your body, make it stronger and savor really good, healthy food. Sample new things, rediscover old things, reflect on both, revamp your goals and renew your commitment to fitness.

This summer’s Small Step is less of a step than, actually, a pause. The step-by-step approach is good and it works. But sometimes it’s valuable to stop and re-evaluate before taking the next step. This assignment is all about taking advantage of the laid back mood of summer by checking in with the mind and soul to make sure they’re on board with the body on the journey to fitness.

If you’re new to the Small Steps series, you can read about the philosophy and strategies of the series here. Know the Small Steps strategies don’t need to be done in any particular order and are independent of one another. So, you can begin the series with this post, continue throughout the rest of the year and pick up what you missed next year.